


What do you believe in? : A review of Houses of the Holy

by yourlibrarian



Series: Supernatural Reviews [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Review, Episode: s02e11 Playthings, Episode: s02e13 Houses of the Holy, Gen, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:15:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29944347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: I re-viewed "Houses of the Holy" and this really strikes me as a remarkable episode in many ways.
Series: Supernatural Reviews [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2202249
Kudos: 1
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	What do you believe in? : A review of Houses of the Holy

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted September 24, 2007.

I re-viewed "Houses of the Holy" and this really strikes me as a remarkable episode in many ways.

The first time I saw it I wondered if it was originally intended to be a Christmas episode because it would have fit very well. S1's faith-centered episode was #12 to HotH's #13 and it could easily have aired in December closer to the holidays since Asylum (#10) aired on November 22. However, thanks to the long gap between that and Scarecrow, Faith aired in late January.

The airing dates were even worse in S2 since only 9 episodes aired before the break. I suppose the mystery of John's words was considered a good stopping point and Croatoan was already airing in mid-December. One thing which stood out to me about Playthings was Sam's drunk scene. It just seemed something inserted that didn't go with the rest of the episode, which was in every other way, a standalone. Also Nightshifter, which followed it, called back to various episodes such as the Usual Suspects and Skin, but was also a standalone episode in regards to the larger arc. It made me wonder if HotH wasn't originally supposed to follow Hunted and air near Christmas.

In any case, the issue of drinking was one of the first things that caught my attention here. When Sam says that he has seen an angel, Dean offers him his flask. Sam is indignant, and it's Dean who takes a swig. At the end of the episode, when Dean offers it to him again, Sam drinks. It made me think about the whole issue of coping mechanisms and what drinking may mean to them.

Even though it seems that John's drinking was an issue that was downplayed after the pilot, and in fact was notably downplayed in between scripts, it remains canonical that John drank often, even if he wasn't an alcoholic. And it's clear that this bothered Sam much more than Dean. What's more, while Dean doesn't appear to drink substantially more than Sam, he seems to do so differently. Dean seems to be largely a social drinker, whereas the one time we've seen Sam drink a lot it's anything but. Ironically, he seems to drink in the same way John does. (As little as we know about John the one thing he doesn't seem to be is sociable). It's not hard to imagine that John may also have been the same sort of maudlin drunk Sam appears to be, using alcohol to cope not to relax.

Which is why the flask moments interested me. Dean seems to be offering alcohol to Sam to do just that, to cope with a potentially stressful event. Sam, however, is not stressed, he's hopeful. In fact if there wasn't still so much uncertainty about the event he'd probably be joyous. Dean on the other hand has just been dealt a blow. By which I don't mean the angel sighting so much as the news he got just before that. Sam, unknown to him all these years, has been praying.

I found it fascinating to think that Sam may be using faith in much the same way his mother did. Knowing now that Mary knew the YED, and may have been demon-infected herself, one can imagine her turning to faith for the same reason Sam does -- in the hope of protection and redemption for something she fears is inside her. This might also explain the reason she lingers in Lawrence and says she's sorry to her sons, that she has always carried guilt about what happened to the family. However we don't know how Mary came to it, just that it's something Dean associates with her. We do know though that she didn't pass it on to Sam, he came to it some other way. He says it's been a long time, so presumably he means before he went off to college. I'd like to think that it may have come around the time that Dean himself began to hunt, and that the separation between them began to grow, so for Sam this might have been 11 or 12. Although Sam was in the car in Dean's story to Gordon about his hunt at 16, there could only have been more instances as time went on that Sam was left on his own. It's not hard to believe that, worried about his brother and father, and not wanting to join them himself, Sam might have wanted to turn to something else to believe in besides the future laid out for him. Perhaps it was his turn to faith that gave him the strength to leave his family in the first place:

"It’s so damn hard to do this, what we do. All alone, you know? And there's so much evil out in the world I feel like I could drown in it…and I needed to to think there was something else watching too"

There are various interesting lines in HotH, the first which comes when we see Sam meet with Gloria. As he enters she says "You're not the usual guy." Of course she means it within the context of the hospital, but she couldn't be more on the money. We don't know how Sam and Dean came to this particular hunt but it seems apparent that it's Sam who found it and wanted to follow up on it given that Dean seems to have little interest in it. The conversation Sam has with Gloria seems to me oddly similar to one he had with Ava. They have been chosen, they have been given signs (their visions), and Sam fears he will be told to kill. Even though Andy is the only YED kid that shows no sign of evil (and dies for it, it seems), Sam seems to draw even more hope from Ava that having been chosen doesn't automatically mean evil will follow. No doubt this is one of the reasons he feels so driven to find her. Yet like Gloria, when Ava is given her "important" mission, she gives in to it rather readily. As Gloria says "I just know what the angel told me…and that was good enough for me."

Of course once Sam sees the angel, he has the same reaction. When Dean asks if he'll kill he says no, but "Someone's going to do something awful and I can stop it." Dean then points out "You're supposed to be bad too, Sam, maybe I should just stop you right now." Interestingly neither of them discusses the possibility that these people could be saved from themselves, not even the guy who has not yet done anything. Yet this is exactly what Sam is trying to do for the other YED kids. Is it simply because he relates to them better, that by saving them he can save himself?

Instead of course it is Dean who insists on saving Sam from himself, locking him out of the car and sending him off to do the séance. The fact that Sam believes the man did have to be killed seems apparent when Dean returns and Sam asks hesitantly if it's Dean who caused the man's death.

When getting confirmation Father Gregory was the angel, Dean pulls out the flask for himself, once again feeling shaken. He then offers it to Sam who this time takes it. It seems to me that it stands for the reality that Dean was trying to impress upon Sam, that people must find safety and protection for themselves. But as Sam says moments later, that's not enough for him. He doesn't have faith in other people. When Dean tells him that he's watching out for Sam, Sam acknowledges it but says "You're only one person." As I said here it seems to me that John's rescue of Dean the night of the fire led Dean to always believe in John. And Dean had this faith in him until the end -- that John would come through for him when needed. He wasn't wrong either. John saved Dean from death at the YED's hands more than once –- first, in "Devil's Trap" when he manages to fight the demon down just long enough –- and then again in AHBL2, when he pulls the demon out of its host long enough to give Dean the chance to kill it. And, of course, John saved Dean from death itself in IMToD. So when Sam says he doesn't understand Dean's "blind faith in the man," the fact is he can't understand it for any human. And perhaps this is why Dean continues to have faith in Sam's essential goodness but Sam doesn't have it for himself. This is really put to the test in the very next episode, where Sam gets possessed. And really the message of BUaBS is that Sam is right not to believe.

Another reason I felt HotH is out of order is that Sam's drunk Playthings spiel makes more sense after this episode than before. Returning to the issue of drinking, the drunk scene would follow on the drink Sam takes at the end of HotH. What message Sam takes away from that episode isn't clear, but there's no indication Sam feels comforted by it as the season goes on. It would follow nicely to have that sip from the flask be Sam's way of acknowledging that he has to rely on himself and what little comfort he can get from the everyday world as a way of moving forward –- hence the drunk binge of despair in Playthings. But that use of drink, so like John's, only seems to point out that Sam doesn't seem to have his strength. Dean is outraged that Sam would get drunk while they're on a job. I'm guessing that from the competent hunter we saw, and Dean's reaction, drinking on a job is one thing John wouldn't do.

Another logical follow-on from HotH would be the pledge Sam forces from Dean. Having been told to trust in Dean, and feeling he has no other recourse, Sam asks him to do what's needed should Sam ever slip. Only Dean won't, he knows it, and when put to the test, he doesn't. But Sam fails to do his part either. Unlike Meg or John he doesn't even remember being possessed though it's been going on for at least a week. And unlike John, even when he is at the point of killing Dean, Sam fails to overcome the demon either when he shoots him or when he is torturing him at Bobby's. Moreover, Dean doesn't even call on him to do so the way he did with John. Maybe he just wants an out –- if Sam kills him, he's free to go on killing many others (starting with Bobby) but Dean himself won't have to be the one to stop him. When he says "I'd rather die" he means it. But it also means he has no faith in Sam to stop himself, regardless of what he tells him. It seems that both Sam and Dean not only understand their own limitations pretty well, but they probably also know one another's. Whatever the intended message of HotH, the Winchesters leave it with neither faith in a higher power, nor a greater faith in one another.


End file.
